Dear Caelin, Grant, and Richard,
I had replaced the KING COBRA CX that I was using on my Spectral 4000SL CD player. I was initially underwhelmed by the ALPHA’s lack of bottom end weight and majesty. Then I let the cable burn and settle in by putting the player on repeat for a couple hundred hours. Then came the sonic transformation of a level of an improved magnitude that blew me away! Up until now, my experience is that your power conditioning “boxes” offered more “bang for the buck” than your power cables. Not that your cables aren’t most excellent, which they are (I have plenty of em!), but that a $5000 TRITON or TYPHON box offered more value than a $3,000 ANACONDA wire. Not any more! In fact, if I had to (reluctantly) relinquish, say one of my TYPHON’s or my ALPHA DIGITAL cable, the TYPHON would be the one to go!
The ALPHA DIGITAL cable is a game changer. This may be the most important product that you have ever introduced to the market! The improvements, not differences, but improvements that I hear, in the context of my reference audio system are many. I will try my best to describe some of them. The soundstage is now much more clarified with an increased sense of imaging placement. Digital glare is tremendously reduced, and with that reduction of glare comes and increased sense of richness and density of timber of both instruments and voices. The sense of increased richness of harmonics and overtones of the instruments on the soundstage has been vastly improved. A guitar sounds more like a live guitar with the warm woody resonance of the soundboard with the interplay of the vibrating strings and their overtones on the harmonics. On piano recordings, I swoon at the hearing the sound of the individual mallets striking the strings and that instrument’s resonance. The piano’s sound and positioning on the stage is much better focused than ever before. Removing the glare from the human voice makes it sound, well, that much more human! Voices now seem to hang in space better than ever before, with every word more intelligible, particularly the ending of words. For example, lets say the vocalist sings the word “last”. Before the ALPHA, the word would sound closer to “lass” (with some digital “spit”), and now sounds like “lasT” (and that enunciated “T” fades off into space). Vocals are SO much easier to follow! The ALPHA also allows the dynamics (macro and micro) of the recording to come though as never before, as I am now hearing each performer’s individual contribution to the collective performance in the rhythm of the tune much more easy to discern. Combine all that I have mentioned and the increased sense of RPT and overall musicality in the sound of my system have gone WAY UP over the price of the ALPHA cable, which is less that a third of the price of the KING COBRA CX that it replaces! In fact if you had marketed this cable for the same price as that KING COBRA, it would have still been a fantastic value. Yes, it’s that good.
You have embarked on a new frontier with the ALPHA DIGITAL that in one fell swoop, has allowed us to hear the improvements that the designers of digital equipment and the designers of their internal componentry have worked to improve in over the past generation. Using an Alpha Digital cable is like taking digital’s sound ahead of where it currently resides into the future by a decade! It is that big of a deal!
With awe and appreciation for what you do…
RAC